“Telemaco Signorini, Vernon Lee and John Singer Sargent: American painting in the Florence of the Macchiaioli, 1880-1890”

In the autumn of 1883, Telemaco Signorini and John Singer Sargent met at Violet Paget’s Florentine salon in via Garibaldi. Sargent had told Paget that he was “very eager” of meeting the most modern painter among the macchiaioli, and she succeeded in forming an interaction between Signorini’s Tuscan naturalism and Sargent’s international impressionism. Miss Paget’s salon was also a meeting place for Italian and American literati. It was there in May 1887 that Henry James met Enrico Nencioni, the Florentine writer who, along with Signorini, had introduced Whitman’s poetry in Italy. Paget broadened Signorini’s contacts within the Anglo-Florentine colony. She introduced him to Agnes Macdonald, wife to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward John Poynter and Burne-Jones’s sister-in-law, to art critic and poet William Cosmo Monkhouse, to painter Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, to Lady Lewis, “a great friend of Sargent’s who owns many beautiful paintings in London”, and to English journalist Helen Zimmern. Years later Zimmern would publish a study of Signorini in The Art Journal (1895) and in Die Kunst Halle (1897). My paper shows how Violet Paget, the heart and soul of Florentine cultural life at the turn of the century, was instrumental in favouring Italian and Anglo-American artistic exchanges.

Silvio Balloni graduated in Italian Literature from the University of Florence in 2005 and earned an international Ph.D in Italian Studies in 2008. He specializes in the relationship between literature and visual arts, on which he has published several essays in catalogues and magazines. He is the editor of Telemaco Signorini’s Zibaldone (2008) and the author of Scrittura e Immagine. Le forme del libro (2012). He was in the organizing committee of the exhibition Telemaco Signorini e la pittura in Europa (Padua, 2010) and was the curator of the exhibitions I Macchiaioli e la fotografia (Florence, 2009), Documenti dei Macchiaioli dal Fondo Vitali. Carte edite e inedite (Firenze, 2009), Il metodo e il talento. Igino Benvenuto Supino primo direttore del Bargello: 1896-1906 (Florence, 2010) and Odoardo Borrani. Al di là della macchia. Opere celebri e riscoperte (Viareggio, 2012).